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- Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights
- July 23, 2002 17:21 PM PST
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The long wait is over. Neverwinter Nights is here.
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Unlimited Adventures
One of the first questions anyone asks about an RPG is, ?What?s the story?? For Neverwinter Nights, that question is difficult to answer. While the game ships with a single-player module that makes Baldur?s Gate look like Adventure for the Atari 2600, that story is only one of thousands of possible adventures for your characters. With Neverwinter Nights, you can play as many diverse stories as you and your friends can come up with, and the quality of the adventures can be as bad or as good as you make them.
You see, Neverwinter Nights is less of a game than it is a toolset for designing games of your own. BioWare has provided you with the exact tools they used to make the single-player game, and you can use them however you want. Want a simple arena with a dragon in it? Easy?put in how big you want the room to be, and then drag a dragon in the middle. If you don?t mind a little elbow grease, you can craft a deep story of your own with princesses and evil priests and wizards and orcs and so on. There?s no reason why skilled players couldn?t create a homemade module that?s as good as, if not better than, the one shipped with the game.
Neverwinter Nuts-n-Bolts
RPGs have always been able to get away with cutting back on presentation in favor of story, but Neverwinter Nights doesn?t make that sacrifice. The game looks absolutely gorgeous; characters are lively and colorful when needed, and vile and hideous when required. The areas you?ll wander through suffer a bit from the modular nature of the maps (the landscape is built in pieces, and it shows), and the characters seem low in detail when looked at too closely. The sound in this game is untouchable; screams in the background in a zombie-infested district and the voices of cavorting patrons in taverns really do a lot to make the experience seem more real.
Programmers have been trying to approximate the nuances of Dungeons & Dragons? ruleset for decades, and Neverwinter Nights is easily as close as anyone?s ever come. Even tricky details like Attacks of Opportunity and clerical domains have translated well with few major changes. Gamers into D&D for the numbers and the rules will be pleased with Neverwinter Nights.
It?s Your World Now
With a solid, gorgeous base game design and scores of community talent waiting to create free content for the game, Neverwinter Nights is a must-get for PC RPG fans with dreams of game design. It might not replace those Saturday night D&D tabletop sessions, but it will easily replace all but the best PC RPGs on your hard drive.
